FEMA ignored early offers of Katrina aid

January 30, 2006|By Joby Warrick, The Washington Post. The New York Times contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — Hundreds of federal search-and-rescue workers and large numbers of boats, aircraft and bulldozers were offered to FEMA in the hours immediately after Hurricane Katrina hit, but the aid proposals were either ignored or not effectively used, newly released documents show.

The Interior Department, which made the offers, also proposed dispatching as many as 400 of its law enforcement officers to provide security in Gulf Coast cities ravaged by flooding and looting. But nearly a month would pass before FEMA put the officers to work, according to an Interior Department document obtained by The Washington Post.

"Although we attempted to provide these assets we were unable to efficiently integrate and deploy these resources," Interior officials said in written response to questions by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Acting in the "immediate aftermath" of the hurricane, Interior officials provided FEMA with a comprehensive list of assets that were "immediately available for humanitarian and emergency assistance," according to the memo, dated Nov. 7, 2005.

Those assets included more than 300 boats, 11 aircraft, 119 pieces of heavy equipment, 300 dump trucks and other vehicles for clearing debris, as well as Interior-owned campgrounds and other lands that could be used as staging areas or emergency shelters.

Also offered were rescue crews from the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service--teams that were trained for urban search-and-rescue missions using flat-bottom boats.

Ultimately, many Fish and Wildlife teams traveled to the gulf and assisted in the rescues of more than 4,500 people--but they were "never formally tasked" for that assignment by FEMA, the document states.

The Interior Department wasn't the only government agency to offer assistance to FEMA that was not used effectively. Amtrak reportedly offered, before the storm, to carry residents out, but its train left nearly empty. New Mexico offered National Guard troops, but for days officials waited for formal approval to use them.

Internal documents reviewed by The New York Times note that the Interior Department is formally a part of the January 2005 Southern Louisiana Catastrophic Hurricane Plan, prepared by FEMA, and was supposed to play a support role in the "need for rescue and sheltering of thousands of victims," according to the plan.

The Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has scheduled hearings this week to explore some of the more notorious shortcomings in the government's response.

Russ Knocke, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, said the department realizes mistakes were made and that it, along with FEMA, was studying what went wrong.